Inspiration as Input
As an artist and storyteller, I’ve often viewed what I make as an “output” while the active reading and exploring of other forms of art as “input.” It just always made sense this way. You are what you eat consume, or something like that. I (like other artists) am a unique conduit, or filter - as I experience and take in the world, I strain out the bits that are beautiful and combine them with other bits, reconstructing them through skill and time, hopefully resulting in something compelling.
I always saw the input, or the specific art I take in, as inspiration. Browsing the kidlit section of a local bookstore, going to a museum, collecting images on Pinterest, reading books, watching movies - all forms of potential inspiration. I seek these experiences out and think of them as valuable additions to whatever creative soup I have sloshing around in there, alongside an 8 year old’s sense of humor, and the remnants of an increasingly distant childhood.
Recently, in a podcast between fellow substackers1,
and , the topic of inspiration came up. Giuseppe and Brian talked about all kinds of things,2 but one of the sections that really got me thinking was when they talked about the value of inspiration. In the resulting newsletter on the topic, Giuseppe dives in deeper, really adding even more to chew on.I’d implore you to both listen to and read the newsletter. In short, Giuseppe lands on a personally and maybe universal creative problem — The problem of the artist waiting to be inspired and having this waiting act as a form of procrastination. I assure you, I am a world class procrastinator and yet I’ve adopted over time his very astute solution he came to in his newsletter: just do it the work. You can’t wait to be inspired when you have a book deadline approaching. You sit down, tell your inner-saboteur begging for inspiration to “F off” and put pencil to paper or stylus to screen or hand to keyboard. So in that, I can co-sign his premise and agree 100% — inspiration as motivation can be a faulty premise.
Where I pushback, is in how I’ve always valued inspiration. Not as something to be waited upon as a catalyst, but as something that is a kind of creative nourishment.3 I see it as latent, powerful bits of, well what Brian said in the podcast:
Where inspiration plays a part, at least in my life, is sort of remind me [sic], in a bigger sense, that things can be done.
Art that moves me is a reminder that art can move me. Children’s books that delight are reminders that, as a medium, it can be done and done well. Compelling work is magic, a river I want to camp out near. Like loose charcoal, I’m hoping it rubs off on me and gets everywhere.4
Inspiration as input means that I’m in conversation with the world and the art that grows from its soil.
It’s rich and good.
(Also, get to work!)
See you next week, friends.
— Jacob
This week’s SIDE QUEST™: How do you think of inspiration?
Both great reads — if you like Drawing a Blank, you’ll like their newsletters too: Notes on Illustration and Random Orbit, respectively.
I literally cheered when they were talking about artist’s mental health and startled my corgi out of a deep sleep. Who ironically has high anxiety.
I don’t mean inspiration as copying, though. It’s more like the premise of Steal Like an Artist, by
. Purveyor of another great Substack.Or glitter if you prefer.